David Ikard - Department of African American and Diaspora Studies, Vanderbilt University

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today’s conversation is with David Ikard, who teaches in the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In addition to a number of scholarly essays, authoring and co-authoring four books - Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism (2007), Nation of Cowards: Black Activism in Barack Obama's Post-Racial America (2012), co-authored with Martell Teasley, Blinded by the Whites: Why Race Still Matters in 21st-Century America (2013), and Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs (2017) - he is a practicing artist whose paintings can be found at ikardgallery.com. In this conversation, we explore the complex political meaning of Black Studies as a site of resistance and also an institutionalized field of study, the relation of politics to intellectual inquiry in the contemporary moment, and the significance of the multiple disciplinary research and intellectual expression that comprise the field’s past, present, and future.